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On the Interaction of Social Affect and Cognition: Empathy, Compassion and Theory of Mind

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On the Interaction of Social Affect and Cognition: Empathy, Compassion and Theory of Mind Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect On the interaction of social affect and cognition: empathy, compassion and theory of mind 1 1,2 1 Katrin Preckel , Philipp Kanske and Tania Singer Empathy, compassion and Theory of Mind (ToM) are central which may be detrimental to the observer and to others topics in social psychology and neuroscience. While empathy and compassion, on the other hand, which is a feeling of enables the sharing of others’ emotions and may result in warmth and concern for the other. We conclude with a empathic distress, a maladaptive form of empathic resonance, concise summary and an opinion statement. or compassion, a feeling of warmth and concern for others, ToM provides cognitive understanding of someone else’s Defining and neurally characterizing empathy, thoughts or intentions. These socio-affective and socio- compassion and Theory of Mind cognitive routes to understanding others are subserved by Empathy describes the process of sharing feelings, that is, separable, independent brain networks. Nonetheless they are resonating with someone else’s feelings, regardless of jointly required in many complex social situations. A process valence (positive/negative), but with the explicit knowl- that is critical for both, empathy and ToM, is self-other edge that the other person is the origin of this emotion [1]. distinction, which is implemented in different temporoparietal This socio-affective process results from neural network brain regions. Thus, adaptive social behavior is a result of activations that resemble those activations observed dynamic interplay of socio-affective and socio-cognitive when the same emotion is experienced first-hand (shared processes. network hypothesis) [2–5]. The first studies in neurosci- ence targeting empathy investigated empathy in the Addresses 1 domain of pain, showing that directly experiencing pain Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Stephanstraße 1A, 04103 Leipzig, Germany and witnessing another person receiving painful stimuli 2 Institute of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Department of results in shared neural activations in the anterior insula Psychology, Technische Universita¨ t Dresden, Dresden, Germany (AI) and anterior middle cingulate cortex (aMCC) [6,7]. Meta-analyses have later identified these regions as a core Corresponding author: Preckel, Katrin ([email protected]) network that is activated whenever we witness the suf- fering of others [8,9]. Furthermore, this network is mod- Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2018, 19:1–6 ulated by individual differences in experienced negative This review comes from a themed issue on Emotion-memory affect and empathy [6,10]. While empathy refers to an interactions isomorphic representation of someone else’s affective Edited by Mara Mather and Michael Fanselow state, compassion is a complementary social emotion elicited by witnessing the suffering of others and is rather For a complete overview see the Issue and the Editorial associated with feelings of concern and warmth, linked to Available online 31st July 2017 the motivation to help [2,11]. Empathy and compassion http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2017.07.010 also differ on a neural level: compassion activates net- ã 2352-1546/ 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an works that have previously been associated with reward open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creative- and affiliation processes including the ventral striatum commons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). (VS), the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental area (VTA), the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) and the subgenual anterior cingulate (sgACC) As a social species, humans are continuously required to [12,13,14 ,15,16 ,17]. Congruently with these activations process complex social signals. Successful multifaceted in reward-associated and affiliation-associated networks, social interactions are enabled by socio-affective and compassion generates positive affect towards others’ suf- socio-cognitive capacities such as empathy, compassion fering. In contrast to compassion, empathic distress, and Theory of Mind (ToM). In this review we will first which is an alternative outcome of empathy, may be define these social functions and describe the neural detrimental to the experiencer as well as to the suffering networks associated with each of them. Further, we other [15,18]. discuss the interaction of empathy and ToM and delin- eate the importance of one crucial process, that is, self- In contrast to socio-affective processes, socio-cognition other distinction. Socio-affective and socio-cognitive pro- refers to taking another person’s perspective (also cesses are also essential for how (prosocially) we interact referred to as ToM, mentalizing, or cognitive empathy). with others, particularly when faced with others’ suffer- Rather than an emotional state, ToM yields abstract, ing. Two possible outcomes of empathic sharing of propositional knowledge about the other’s mental state. others’ suffering are empathic distress on the one hand, It describes the process of inferring and reasoning about www.sciencedirect.com Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2018, 19:1–6 2 Emotion-memory interactions the beliefs, thoughts or emotions of others [19–22]. Cru- necessarily proficient mentalizers [27 ]. In line with such cial brain regions involved in ToM include the ventral independent functions, selective impairments in empa- temporoparietal junction (TPJ), superior temporal sulcus thy or ToM have been observed in different psycho- (STS), temporal poles (TP), medial prefrontal cortex pathologies such as autism and psychopathy. In autism, (MPFC) and precuneus/posterior cingulate (PCC) [23]. ToM is deficient [28–31], while no empathy deficits are observed when controlling for alexithymia [32–35]. In Interactions of social affect and social psychopathy or chronic aggression, in contrast, ToM is cognition intact, but the propensity to empathize with others is Both socio-affective and socio-cognitive processes have reduced [36,37]. been extensively investigated [6,8,9,23,24]. However, research has only recently begun to study how these Despite being separable, empathy and ToM are jointly processes are related and work together to achieve adap- required in many complex social situations. An indirect tive social behavior. Making use of a novel task (Empa- source of evidence for such co-activation is a meta-analy- ToM) [25 ] that stimulates both functions concurrently sis on different empathy for pain paradigms, which sug- (see Figure 1), the respective neural correlates can be gests that the core region of the ToM network is co- directly compared. The EmpaToM clearly activates sep- activated in empathy paradigms when additional inferring arable brain networks that can be replicated in resting from a cue is required to understand the other’s state. [8]. state functional connectivity [25 ] and on a brain struc- The paradigms investigated in this meta-analysis varied tural level [26 ]. Crucially, individual differences in depending on the information provided to the partici- empathy and ToM are unrelated on a behavioral and pants. In picture-based paradigms, they were presented neural level, that is, strong empathizers are not with visual depictions of someone in a painful situation, Figure 1 EmpaToM task Neutral Emotional Theory Factual nonToM ToM nonToM ToM of Mind Reasoning Anna thinks that It is correct that a) ... a) ... b) ... b) ... c) ... c) ... Valence Compassion Confidence + Anna + Question + rating rating rating 1-3 s 2 s ~ 15 s 4 s 4 s 1-3 s max. 15 s 0-2 s 4 s How do you feel? How much compassion How confident do you do you feel? feel? negative neutral positive none very much uncertain certain Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences The EmpaToM task. This figure presents the experimental set-up of the EmpaToM task (previously published here [25 ]). The design is a 2 (emotionality of video) Â 2 (ToM requirements) design, resulting in four different video types. Each actor presented each video type: emotional negative and neutral videos, as well as videos with ToM requirements or factual reasoning demands. Each video was followed by various ratings, a valence rating (ranging from negative to positive) and a compassion rating (ranging from none to very much compassion they felt for the person in the video. Afterwards they answered a question that either probed for ToM or factual reasoning. After each question, participants were asked how confident they felt about their answer. For further information on this task, please refer to Kanske et al. [25 ]. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2018, 19:1–6 www.sciencedirect.com On the interaction of social affect and cognition Preckel, Kanske and Singer 3 whereas in cue-based paradigms, participants were pre- external world [39]. It has, however, also been discussed sented a cue/hint that someone else is receiving painful as important in psychopathology, for instance in border- stimulation. Common activations were observed in the line personality disorder for which a stress related men- typical empathy related core network. However, the two talizing deficit has been hypothesized [40]. paradigm types resulted in different co-activations. As the cue-based paradigms require additional inference of the Self-other distinction other’s affective state from an abstract cue, the ToM The distinction of self and other constitutes an important related network is co-active [8]. The pictorial presenta- element
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